Author of ‘Show Your Work’ Shares Three Secrets to Success

Austin Kleon, the author of Show Your Work, shared some tips to getting noticed in Metro newspapers.

For starters, he suggests sharing something small every day. Be useful to other people.

He reveals to the newspaper:

“Some of the writers I follow [online] share their favorite sentence that they read every day. Or an artist will just share a page from their sketchbook. Little bits and pieces you can share every day that kind of put yourself out there and keep people up to date with what you’re doing. It’s kind of like if a filmmaker will share the DVD extras – the deleted scenes and the directors commentaries – while they were still making the movie.”

His second nugget of wisdom? Tell good stories. As in really good. Our work won’t speak for itself, he says. One of the best ways to tell good stories is to surround yourself with other good storytellers. Break it down and figure out each story’s structure.

He tells the newspaper, “You can kind of steal the structure of the stories and fill them in with your own material.”

As for his third tip, he reminds us it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Although as a society we’re pretty obsessed with being an overnight success, the truth of the matter is when you research success stories, a lot of work, sweat and practice has happened behind the scenes.

Per the piece, he advises, “I think it’s really important just to give yourself time. You’re not going to start a blog and then it’ll take off right away. You’re going to have to give it time. It took me years before people saw my poems. I just kept making work and kept putting it out there. And slowly over time people who were looking for work like that found it.”

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